Category Archives: Collection

In March 1911 the Spanish painter Joaquín Sorolla y Bastida spoke to a newspaper reporter in front of the facade of the City Art Museum, now the Saint Louis Art Museum. Surveying Art Hill, he extolled the city’s landscape and clear atmosphere: “I am astounded. I am overcome…The air is more beautiful, more clear than… Read More »

Hermon A. MacNeil was an up-and-coming younger American sculptor at the time of the Louisiana Purchase Exposition in 1904. At the fair, his Fountain of Liberty and four other sculpture groups were placed along the Main Cascade. Three additional MacNeil works were much admired inside the Fines Arts Palace, now known as the Saint Louis… Read More »

Every year, the Saint Louis Art Museum expands our collection, broadening our scope and diversifying our offerings. In 2016, the Museum added over 120 pieces to the collection, some of which are already on view in our galleries. Each work adds depth and brings its own unique story to the collection. Click through the slideshow below… Read More »

In the late 1930s and 40s, Mexico had an immense allure for Surrealist artists, many of whom fled the advance of Nazi forces across Europe. Not only were Mexico’s entry procedures for foreigners relatively relaxed, but after a 1938 visit, the French founder of Surrealism, André Breton, declared the country, with its dramatic landscape, idiosyncratic… Read More »

In 1964, two aspiring German art students approached renowned conceptual artist Joseph Beuys and requested he provide them a room at the Staatliche Kunstakadamie, the art academy in Dusseldorf. Surprised by their bold request, Beuys provided Rainer Giese and Klaus Wolf Knoebel access to Studio Number 19 and gave them a one-year timeline to see… Read More »

It was the best of times (exciting new acquisition), it was the worst of times (the Depression). Both wisdom and folly were in ample supply when the Museum purchased Cat, an exquisite Egyptian artifact created during the 26th Dynasty of Egypt (664–525 BC). Sculpted in bronze and originally intended to contain a cat mummy, this… Read More »

Life. That’s what Dorothea Lange (1895-1965) set out to depict when she captured the iconic image of mother and migrant farm laborer Florence Owens Thompson in 1936. On assignment for the Farm Security Administration to document the impact of federal programs in rural areas, Lange arrived at a California migrant-workers settlement and encountered Thompson, who… Read More »

Water Lilies has returned to Gallery 218 after a nine-month hiatus that took the painting to Cleveland and London for the exhibition Painting the Modern Garden: Monet to Matisse. The Museum’s Water Lilies is the central panel of the 42-foot Agapanthus triptych, which Monet started to paint around 1915 and continued to rework and obsessively… Read More »

In honor of International Women’s Day, we celebrate the female weavers who designed and created most of the works in The Carpet and the Connoisseur: The James F. Ballard Collection of Oriental Rugs. To better understand these artists, we asked for an expert’s opinion. Walter B. Denny, the exhibition’s guest curator and the distinguished professor… Read More »

For the past 10 days we’ve been highlighting amazing works of art that became part of the SLAM collection in 2015. You can read each installment here. Happy New Year! Perhaps the most significant 2015 addition to the Art Museum’s collection was announced just weeks ago — Horace Pippin’s Sunday Morning Breakfast. The 1943 painting… Read More »